Colin Gorrie

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly)

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I did not know that... truly bizarre. Thank you!

And the purists couldn’t even follow their own rules: Cheke alone used dozens of Latin loanwords in his own writing.

One of the few words championed by purists that's still in common use is “naysay,” probably because it was already used in Scotland before the purists ever got to it.

“Negation” was first attested before 1425, “logic” had been used by English writers since 1362, and “resurrection” since about 1300. “Prophet” was first used before the Norman Conquest!

The purists were pulling up roots, rather than pruning new growth...

One purist, Sir John Cheke, proposed “gainrising” for resurrection and “foresayer” for “prophet.” His colleague Ralph Lever gave us “witcraft” for logic and “naysay” for negation.

But these Latin-derived words had been used in English for generations.

In the 1550s, a group of purists decided Latin loanwords were corrupting the English language. Their solution was to coin “pure English” replacements.

Some of their proposals were pretty weird.

Could Beowulf see blue? The history of English colour words

The whole system seems to have been built around brightness rather than hue.

So how did the modern system evolve? How did English go from six basic colours to the eleven we have today?

I wrote up the full story here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-en...

Old English colour words are genuinely strange.

First, there were only six basic colour terms, and they each covered a lot of the colour space.

The word brūn, the ancestor of "brown," could mean brown, purple, dark red, or the gleam of a polished sword.

And "blue" was barely in the picture.

This week, I wrote about how Greek and Russian speakers process blue differently than English speakers do, because their languages carve it into two colours.

But English has its own version of this story.

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong

Speaking of good stories, if you'd like to read the full account of the long debate how language affects thought, it's up today on my newsletter:

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/sapir-whor...

The weak version, where the language you speak gives a slight processing advantage in lab conditions, doesn't make for great fiction.

And nothing travels faster than a good story!

And yet it’s the strong version that has lived on in the public mind.

So why won't that version die?

In part, because it's irresistible to storytellers. From Orwell's Newspeak to the alien language of Arrival, the strong version offers a world where language is magic.

As a result of research like Malotki’s, the strong version has disappeared from within the walls of linguistics departments.

But alongside this, study after study has confirmed that the weak version is basically right in limited circumstances: language does nudge thought at the margins.

In 1983, the linguist Ekkehart Malokti published a 700-page rebuttal.

The epigraph of his book was a single Hopi sentence, translated as: “Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again.”

Touché!

The strong version was built on Benjamin Lee Whorf’s claim that the Hopi language had “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’.”

Whorf believed that this led to an entirely different way of perceiving the world.

But if you give Russian speakers a verbal task that occupies the language centres of the brain while they’re distinguishing colours, the advantage vanishes completely.

This is evidence that the (slight) Russian superpower comes from language.

The weak version has real evidence behind it. The strong version does not.

Here’s what the weak version looks like in practice. Russian has two basic words for blue: siniy (dark) and goluboy (light).

Russian speakers distinguish shades across that boundary faster than English speakers do.

There are two versions of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the strong version says language constrains what you can think.

The weak version says language affects what you think.

For example, it might make you slightly faster at distinguishing colours, or bias how you remember spatial arrangements.

The idea is usually called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

But the name is misleading: the two linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored a paper. In fact, the term was coined after both were dead, by a third linguist.

But the name has stuck.

There was an idea in linguistics that the language you speak determines what you can think. That is, if your language has no word for a concept, that concept is unavailable to you.

This idea has been more or less dead in linguistics for decades. But it’s had a strange afterlife in the wider world.

Dead Language Society | Colin Gorrie | Substack English is weirder than you think. A weekly dive into the hidden history of everyday words. Click to read Dead Language Society, by Colin Gorrie, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subsc...

Full story out tomorrow.

If you're not already reading Dead Language Society, here's the link: www.deadlanguagesociety.com

Why the worst idea in linguistics won't die.

The most famous idea from linguistics is that your language determines what you can think.

It's the premise behind the film Arrival, Orwell's Newspeak, and every “untranslatable word” listicle.

And it's been dead in linguistic circles for a long time... although it has had a curious afterlife.

Thank you, Gretchen! A little thorn and yogh go a long way!

Even Latin “sinister” likely originated in a word meaning ‘more advantageous.’

This process is called taboo avoidance: the same impulse that makes people say “the good folk” instead of naming the fairies.

You give something a nice name not because you like it, but because you’re afraid of it.

Latin “sinister” just meant ‘left’ before it meant ‘evil.’ The word keeps going bad, and speakers keep reaching for a fresh euphemism.

Ancient Greek did something similar to Old English, calling the left side “aristeros,” ‘the better one.’

It was a superstitious euphemism. The left side was considered unlucky and dangerous, so you called it something nice to keep it from harming you.

Across European languages, words for ‘left’ are strikingly unstable, constantly being replaced as each new term absorbs the old stigma.

Old English didn't use the words “left” and “right” for the two hands. Instead, it used “winestre” and “swiþre”: ‘friendlier’ and ‘stronger.’

But ‘friendlier’ wasn’t meant as a compliment.

How far back in time can you understand English? An experiment in language change

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.

It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.

www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

Þy furðor þu underbæc færst, þy gelicor biþ Englisc gesewen þære Deniscan spræce. Englisce bec þæs m. geare ne mæg nan mann rædan buton he sundorlice geleornad sy.

Yet tuo hundred wintre er, sone after þat the Normans comen to þis londe, is Englisch on muchel wandlunge. Þe tunges work is tobroken, Frensce wordes comeþ in, and þe writunge is al totwemed.